


Wish Bone, Funny Bone, Broken Heart

by CaitlinFairchild



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e01 The Empty Hearse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, PTSD Sherlock, Sherlock Series 3 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-04
Updated: 2014-01-04
Packaged: 2018-01-07 09:08:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1118088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaitlinFairchild/pseuds/CaitlinFairchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Except John tells him to go to his mind palace, and Sherlock tries, he goes through the motions, but the earthquakes have cracked the foundations and crumbled the walls and the shelves have toppled, spilling the contents everywhere, treasures crushed underfoot. Sherlock surveys the carnage with a despair bordering on panic. He opens his eyes. “I’m sorry, John,” he says. “I don’t know.”</p><p>---</p><p>Sherlock has returned. Everything is fine. Except.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wish Bone, Funny Bone, Broken Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Wish Bone, Funny Bone, Broken Heart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1159461) by [Rainy_Elliot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainy_Elliot/pseuds/Rainy_Elliot)



> SERIES 3 SPOILERS!
> 
> Un-beta'd and un-Britpicked. All mistakes are mine alone.
> 
> Constructive Criticism welcomed. Comments are love.
> 
> Come follow me on Tumblr:  
>    
> [CaitlinIsPiningforJohnlock](http://caitlinispiningforjohnlock.tumblr.com/)

Sherlock Holmes moves through his London with a confident, long-legged stride, Belstaff swirling about him, his doctor at his side as he deduces and insults and charms and solves his way through the days. His name had been cleared; John had taken him back; and The Work, the endless grinding blessed Work stretches out before him to divert and occupy his restless, itching, aching brain. All is forgiven. All is well.

Except--

Except he plays Operation and Battleship and Mousetrap with Mycroft for hours and Mycroft indulges him. The man who is the entirety of the British government spends entire afternoons behind the closed blinds of Baker Street with his brother, still smarmy, still sarcastic, but Sherlock knows the way Mycroft looks at him when he thinks Sherlock can’t see. Sherlock rolls his eyes in exasperation--the insufferable _git_ , he’ll be holding that rescue over Sherlock’s head forever, like Sherlock owes him something, like Sherlock owes him his _life_ \--and resets Cavity Sam carefully, dropping the cracked heart, anatomically incorrect, how _juvenile_ \--carefully into place. He doesn’t send Mycroft away. They play another game. And another, as the afternoon shadows stretch into twilight. 

Except--

Except he smiles too much. Laughs too much, and at the wrong times. At first, he chalks it up to returning to London, to John, to the drama of returning from the dead, his vindication and then veneration in the press that he had never before cared a bit about. Then the collapse, the hollowness after that feels so much like the old days, like the crash after the high, the thin shaky feeling and acrid taste of dopamine depletion and the itchy prickle of unshed tears that come on out of nowhere and it’s all he can do to get himself behind a closed door before they fall and he can’t control it, the locked boxes where he kept his feelings carefully tucked away have all been ransacked, the locks cut and hinges smashed. He thinks sometimes of Baskerville, but there is no drug here, just the shifting tectonic plates of his own psyche that he doesn’t even understand. It’s all so ordinary, so beneath him to be so out of control, he thinks as he sits with his back against his bedroom wall and cries. So _shameful_.

Except--

Except John tells him to go to his mind palace, and Sherlock tries, he goes through the motions, but the earthquakes have cracked the foundations and crumbled the walls and the shelves have toppled, spilling the contents everywhere, treasures crushed underfoot. Sherlock surveys the carnage with a despair bordering on panic. He opens his eyes. “I’m sorry, John,” he says. “I don’t know.”

Except--

Except he still carries John with him, the John that lived in his head for two years, the one who was by his side in Buenos Aires, in Mexico City, in Leavenworth, in Hamburg. The John who showed him the final clue that brought down the Argentinian mercenaries, who held his hand through the ravages of dysentery in Central America, who helped him find the antique law that led to a German murder conviction, who whispered to him gently as he waited for death at the hands of a pair of comically stupid but lethally violent Serbian thugs. Sometimes he spends hours in conversation with the John in his head, and when the real John (is he the real John? Sometimes, Sherlock isn’t sure, which is in and of itself more than a Bit Not Good) stops in after work, shrugging off his jacket and asking if there’s anything in for tea, Sherlock will hear both of their voices at the same time and, caught in between the the two, will flee to his bedroom, slamming the door behind him and leaving John to wonder what the hell got into Sherlock this time. “It’s all right,” soothes the John in his head. “I’m still here. I’m always here.”

Except--

Except he can’t delete anything anymore, even though he’s tried and tried and _tried_ , and in the fetid gloom of that makeshift cell that was sure to be his tomb he thought about John’s gentle hands and the way his eyes looked when Sherlock was clever and the way his shirts stretched across his shoulders and the way his soft hair glowed golden in the sun, and finally, finally, Sherlock allowed himself to acknowledge the truth, allowed himself to feel his love for John just once as he waited for his life to end for real. And now it sits like a rock in his chest and he can’t delete it. He can’t. It’s a dull knife blade in his heart, and he’s not even supposed to have a heart, and he really really wants some heroin because this fucking hurts and he doesn’t know how else to make it stop.

Except--

Except everything is too bright and too sharp like some kind of hypersaturated dream, and sometimes Sherlock wonders if this is all the final fleeting hallucination of a broken body, dying in a locked shipping container rusting in a Belgrade slum.

Except--

Sometimes, when he lies awake and alone in the small hours when even London is still, he feels all the broken edges inside of his mind, and he wishes it was.


End file.
